Betta Fish Project

I've had to go in to work the last couple days, so I have been tired and haven't blogged much. I'm fighting a little bit of a 'puppet' battle today, so I don't really trust the words that I write.

But, the project going on right now is that I am trying to find a home for a Betta fish that I got from my friend Peter. I can't take care of the fish very well, and neither could Peter, and I don't really want to have an aquarium fish, partly because I feel sorry for them and I would rather keep them outside in a pond or something if I could. But Bettas are tropical, so I can't do that here, and I would have to mail him to someone elsewhere and then verify that he was received alive, etc, and that they did what I asked. After getting into this project, I noticed a news article about a pet store that supposedly received a man's dead body instead of a fish shipment. This is one of those news articles where I question the source of the information.

Anyway, as I review the responses to the ad, I am thinking of everything I read in Diana Leafe Christian's books about community. When they take in new members, they have to go through a long process of learning whether that person can be trusted. I am doing the same thing as I read the emails responding to my ad. I am looking for people willing to comply with the things I said about how I want the fish to be treated. And I am telling myself, no rush, and in fact, I'm giving him away for free, so if I don't want to, I don't even have to give him away AT ALL, if I don't like any of the responses. It will take a while to decide.

I am taking it almost as seriously as if I were giving a child away for adoption. This is actually an important learning process if I am going to 1. meet new people, 2. get married and raise children, and 3. build/join communities. All of those situations require you to evaluate who is trustworthy, who will work well with you in the long term, whose goals are compatible with your own.

I don't have a lot of time to write, and I finished the DLC books and had so much I wanted to say about them. I wish that I had a scanner and I could just do an optical character recognition and scan the paragraphs I'd like to quote. There are so many issues in there that are exactly what I've been thinking about for years - I think I have already said that about those books. It's all about cooperating with people on long-term projects.

As I think about that I've noticed that some of my favorite childhood fiction stories were about the topic of 'building a community.' Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of Nimh, and also Watership Down were both about building a new community. (Yes, I'm hand-typing the letter 'u' to make the html underline.) In other words, this is something that I was thinking about years ago, but didn't realize it.